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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

NFL Study Indicates Higher Rate of Dementia

Study conducted by U of M Institute for Social research. A small snippet:

"A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49."http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/sports/football/30dementia.html

The sad thing is that there are football helmets out there with extra padding (on the outside) which are believed to greatly reduce incidence of head trauma, but IIRC, only one player in the NFL has ever worn one. Fashion trumps functionality.

Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It’s buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that’s a foot thick. It’s not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You’ve got a face mask that’s like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That’s when a lot of these fibers are sheared—by rotation. A helmet can’t ever prevent that.

[EDIT: There are some people who disagree with the research in GQ, and they may very well present valid points. I'm not suggesting GQ is or isn't an objective news source]

I saw this just a few minutes ago; the NFL is doing its own more detailed study (very slowly...). The second paragraph in the article reminded me of another industry:

>>The N.F.L. has long denied the existence of reliable data about cognitive decline among its players. These numbers would become the league’s first public affirmation of any connection, though the league pointed to limitations of this study.<<

I also thought about this yesterday when reading about Tim Tebow's concussion and that D-Bag Urban Meyer's comment that he thought Tebow may be able to play LSU in two weeks (Florida has a bye this Saturday). More here from ESPn:

The last thing a guy like Tebow needs is any pressure to come back prematurely from an injury like this. Florida put out a press release today that this is Tebow's first concussion. How would they know?

They keep making the helmets better, but they also keep developing stronger and faster players.

It's not surprising that there is a higher incidence of dementia and Alzheimer's among NFL players. However, the disease seems to have multiple "indicators" for onset. One of which is, obviously, head trauma. However, the reason head trauma is an indicator is up for debate. The deeper prevailing thought among researchers seems to be related to repeated inflammation. This can be caused by many things, including infections and, of course, head trauma. There is another relation that is more important here, I think. That is the indications that rates of Alzheimer's, and more generally, dementia, are inversely proportional to education level. Another indicator is mental activity in the "retirement red zone" (ages 50-65) It would be interesting to see what the actual assessed education level of NFL players is, not just the "attained". Let's face it, not all NFL players were college material in the classroom. Also, especially recently, many NFL players do little to no mentally taxing work post football retirement. This factors combined are a tough combination of "risk factors" that can add up fast.

I don't agree about the "inversely proportional to education level" assessment. Both my wife and I are in elder care (with my wife doing a substantial amount of work with Alzheimer's patients) and in our experience most of our Alzheimer's patients/clients are pretty highly educated, at least comparatively with their peer group.

Supposedly up for debate, however, based on the most current research the Med School is feeding us, and the Geriatrician who gave the dementia lectures, there is significance in the dementia rates and education levels.

Sorry, I was trying to edit my first comment to fill in some blanks before you responded, but you beat me to it. I wasn't meaning to be a jerk, so I'm sorry if it came across that way. I understand that there is research out there that shows some sort of correlation, but it doesn't seem to jive with what we see in our patients/clients. My wife has MUCH more experience with Alzheimer's patients, so I'll just talk about her experience. Her patients are predominantly not private pay with some that are private pay. Her experience is that most of her Alzheimer's patients are more highly educated than her non-Alzheimer's patients. I realize this is a small subset and that in the larger scheme of things it might not be representative, but I was surprised that you presented the inverse relationship as something that is firmly established since I hadn't heard it presented that way before. I'm not sure if that's what you meant, but that's how I read it. Regardless, I'm glad that this subject is getting more attention, as it's something that I'm extremely interested in, and it's nice to talk about it here. One thing that strikes me as potentially problematic with these studies is their definition of "educated". I'm curious as to whether they have adjusted education level for the studied group since what is considered "educated" for that age group is not consistent with what we considered "educated" today.

No problem, duder. I was getting worried! You didn't come off as a jerk at all; I hope I didn't come off as a huge authority on the subject, either. I agree, however, that there are so many problems with the studies of education/educational background and, well, pretty much anything. It is fairly nebulus - does an M.D. degree make you more educated than a Ph.D. in philosophy (however redundant...but that's another story...)? Does a political science degree from U of M have the same educational merit as one from Central Tennessee State? Can you flatly say that I.Q. "x" is better than "y", or just greater than? It's a tough problem.
I'm not sure where they got their data to present to us, if it was based on studies from our hospital system or empirical data from peer-reviewed papers or what.

Check out ex-Harvard football player-turned-WWE wrestler Chris Nowinski's website. He had to retire from the WWE with post-concussion syndrome, and has formed a non-profit organization to study the effects of concussions on athletes. I already knew a lot of this stuff because I've had a few concussions myself, but his work is still an eye-opener.

This is the elephant in the room for professional football players. The post-playing injuries are absolutely horrific. In college you just don't play long enough to sustain the sort of damage that a pro career will do. Also the players are more reliably athletic making your exposure more dangerous.

Still, as others have noted, I'd like to see a full-on controlled study of the NFL data accounting for other risk factors to determine how much of it had to do with contact football and how much was other things (including non-contact training, diet, whatever they do in the offseason...)